When "colorways" were first introduced I was very excited about the feature. I had a design collection where the User can change the background color to anything they want for mix & match sets and I published each product in four colors just to provide example and inspiration to shoppers. Having the colorways right on the product pages makes it much better as otherwise shoppers would have to be viewing the collection to realize the potential in changing colors. Since then I've published more things in multiple colors as I believe it probably does help with sales, giving them multiple choices right on the one page in case they're not creative enough to think up their own colors.
However, at this point in time I am leaning towards NOT doing colorways and paring down the one's I've already done because:
1) One of the benefits of colorways was to reduce "clutter" in the MP. Instead of having say 8 pillows identical except for color in results, there's just one w/ the color swatches for the other versions. Great! Except you can't choose which color version appears in results. So if someone was searching for just say "modern floral pillow", the Zazzle algorithm chooses which of the 8 to show. If they're searching more specifically for "modern orange floral pillow" then of course it will show the one you tagged with "orange". But for more generic search terms that could apply to any item in the colorway set, you can't control which one appears. Maybe not a big deal for most but for me it seems like it always picks my absolute least favorite version so that has irked me since Day 1.
2) When someone clicks on a different color swatch, the PID changes to that other-color product so that's the product that would show on earnings reports if they buy it. Unless I am missing something obvious, there is no way to know if they got to that color directly or by using the colorway swatches from a different color version they found. So I don't think there's a way to effectively measure how much colorways drive sales?
3) One thing we have learned, pretty conclusively I think, is that a big factor in Zrank is ratio of number of products to number of sales. So the more colorways we make of the same product, the more unfavorable that ratio becomes. (Unless of course all the color versions are selling.) So I am leaning towards, if it's something the customer can easily change themselves, to not do different colorways that would negatively impact my zRank.
4) Now that we can add as many as 10 custom images to a product, I feel like we can use that to show customers examples of different versions they can do themselves, something I tried here for this deck of cards (second image).
The big drawback to not doing multiple colorways is that it of course reduces your presence in the MP. Going back to the above pillow example, if you publish only one pillow in orange with the intention of customers being able to change it to any other color they prefer, you're kind of stuck tagging it as just orange. You can't tag it dusty blue, lemon yellow, magenta .... all the other infinite colors one could change it to. So you're only going to be found by people doing more generic searches, or those asking specifically for orange. With colorways you can tag each individual version appropriately increasing the odds of people finding your items.
So it's a toss-up and everyone is going to weigh the pros & cons differently. For me personally, I am def leaning towards paring down on color versions because of #3 & #4 and because I just don't like a lot of "clutter" in my store and fewer products are easier to manage.
